Hosting Tutorial & Guide

Both Media Temple and GoDaddy have been in the industry for more than 15 years and been following by millions of webmasters around the world, which makes it hard to know which offers better features and performance. To figure it out, we started to host 2 medium sized WordPress sites on their shared platforms and browse verified feedbacks from their real customers 6 months ago.

Based on our hosting experience and the information we collected, we have worked out an unbiased comparison on the price, feature, reliability, performance and technical support of their shared hosting service. Besides, we have developed a rating table as below, which shows that GoDaddy got 4 out of 5 stars, surpassing it competitor slightly.

Plans & Price

Founded in 1998, Media Temple has released 1 shared hosting plan for customers hosting personal or medium-sized business websites, which is named as Grid and priced at $20/mo. Because this service doesn't include a free domain name, people who don't have a ready domain name have to pay $15/year for domain registration. In addition, enabled domain privacy costs $8/year.

As one of the most reputed domain registrar, GoDaddy has been providing shared hosting service for a pretty long time. This web host offers 3 different shared hosting solutions named as Economy, Deluxe and Ultimate, the regular price of which starts from $6.99/mo, $8.99/mo and $14.99/mo. However, visitors who subscribe any of the plans now are able to get an over 44% discount and cut the price down to $3.99/mo, $4.99/mo and $6.99/mo.

In addition to the huge discount, each package comes with a large number of extra benefits, such as a free domain name for 1 year, $100 Google advertising credits, $100 Bing AdWords voucher, $100 Facebook advertising voucher and 10 Fotolia photo credits.

Feature

When it comes to hosting feature, the 2 companies shared a lot of similarities. Both of them provide PHP 5.5, MySQL 5.1.x and Apache to ensure that their shared hosting services are 100% compatible with WordPress and Joomla. Besides, 1-click script installer is integrated with their service to enable customers to install any one more than 100 popular applications with a free clicks, within 1 minute.

In addition, they both offer a number of free email accounts. However, there are also many differences between among the shared plans. The most significant one is that Media Temple uses the custom control panel developed by themselves, and its competitor adopts the most easy-to-use control panel – cPanel. Learn more information about feature in the following table. Note that GoDaddy Ultimate plan and Grid from the other one are selected in this part.

Feature

Plan In Review

Grid Plan

Ultimate Plan

Disk Space

100 GB

Unlimited

Hosted Websites

100

Unlimited

Hosted Domains

100

Unlimited

Monthly Data Transfer

1 TB

Unlimited

Email Accounts

1,000

1,000

Databases

100

Unlimitedx1GB

PHP 5.5

Perl

MySQL

cPanel

Shared SSL

SSH

Money Back Guarantee

30 Days

Anytime

Regular Price

$20/mo

$14.99/mo

Discount

N/A

53%

Effective Price

$20/mo

$6.99/mo

Reliability & Performance

Media Temple utilizes 2 peerless data centers on the East Coast and West Coast, both of which are equipped with hundreds of high performance Dell servers, Tier 3+, UPS and diesel generators. Moreover, technicians and engineers are monitoring the data centers and servers 24x7, so that they are able to find and resolve any sudden issues as soon as they occur to protect the hosted websites from any unexpected interruption.

As for GoDaddy, this web host has built multiple state-of-the-art data centers in North America, Europe and the Pacific-Asia region respectively, in which they use hundreds of 100% factory-tested Dell servers, redundant power supply and quantities of diesel generators. All the facilities make the company provides a good uptime for customers to run websites smoothly and stably. Our monitoring result shows that the uptime of GoDaddy of the past 30 days is 99.9% on average, as same as that of the other one.Media Temple adopts the latest server technologies, like PHP 5.5 and FastCGI lowing the overhead associated with interfacing the web server and CGI programs, allowing a server to handle more webpage requests at once. Therefore, customers are able to run sites with up to 6x faster page loading speed. According to our monitoring result, the server response time of this company is 430ms which is much less than 784ms of its competitor's.

Read the following statistics chart for the real-time server response time of GoDaddy of the past 30 days.

Technical Support

Media Temple is highly recommended by many webmaster for its quality technical support. This web host allows customers to contact them through toll-free phone call, email and live chat 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. All the support staffs are professional and well-trained, so that they are able to provide instant and effective support for customers to deal with any hosting problem.

Unlike its competitor, GoDaddy only offer support via toll-free phone call and email, which means customers who are non-English-native speakers and unable to communicate with support representatives can't get instant help to resolves their issues to protect the business from any damage.

However, technicians and engineers in both web hosts have worked out a pile of in-depth articles and detailed video tutorials with lots information about hosting, from which customers are able to find the answers of many common issues to solve their trouble.

Conclusion

From the impartial comparison below, in general, it can be concluded that the shared hosting plans from both companies are feature-rich and reliable. Specifically, the service from Media Temple is fast but a little expensive, and the service from another is affordable but much slower than the average of shared hosting plans. Therefore, neither of them is worth going.

For people who are looking for affordable, feature-rich, reliable and fast shared web host, we have developed the following table to show them 3 of the best shared web hosting providers. Learn details in below.

We've been an independent web hosting review site, and have reviewed 200+ web hosts since 2006 - trying to help web masters find the best hosting deals based on the budget and requirement, including shared web hosting, VPS hosting, reseller hosting and dedicated servers.